


The Elements, Abridged

by DaisyIfYouHave



Category: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon
Genre: Angst, Gen, and my personal favorite, ever my beacon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2020-05-02 08:43:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19195501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaisyIfYouHave/pseuds/DaisyIfYouHave
Summary: The fairytale wasn’t true anymore. What did the princess do when the fairytale wasn’t true anymore?





	The Elements, Abridged

Rei knew, in her heart, that most people did not read the signs in the fire and smoke, that it was a particular gift she had, but that did not stop her from wondering why that was true. The smoke curled and turned against the bright fire, dark as calligraphy, bleeding out as it spelled the future out onto the parchment of her mind, clear and direct.

Had it been like this for Michiru? Hard to say. For Michiru it seemed less like a story and more like a painting, vivid and strong and defying explanation. She never explained it to Rei–she never explained anything to Rei with anything but a wave of her hand and her signature closed mouth smile. It had annoyed her, then. It still annoyed her now, but it was mixed with a fondness that only grief can bring up, the desire to be irritated by someone long gone.

It had become distinctly less hard to say, lately. Something had happened when Michiru died–and maybe it had happened with all of them, but Michiru’s haunted her, that some fragment of her had ended up within Rei. She had begun to see them, the images that must have plagued Michiru. Or more likely, the images that never had a chance to plague Michiru, bright and clear, but only for a moment, only a quick glimpse of what might be. She dreaded them.

The cruelest were those that showed what might have been, an image of Mako grinning proudly over a cake set down in front of Usagi, Haruka with a baby on her lap, party hat askew, Ami with a stethoscope around her neck, Michiru chatting with a genuine smile, her hand on Haruka’s leg. Rei, with her hand on Usagi’s shoulder, and Mina’s hands around Rei’s waist.

It was a stupid vision.

She pulled herself away from the fire, away from a story that no longer seemed to make sense, the once-firm calligraphy bleeding and yawning into long dark shadows that said nothing but simply howled, long and low.

_Usagi was wrong_ , they screamed.

_Usagi was wrong, and it killed us_.

  
  


**

Usagi had imagined adulthood would come in fits and in starts, and, mostly , that had been true. She had grown and fought and triumphed, and each time it had, she had thought, changed her, strengthened her.

But what she did not imagine was that someday she would stand looking at her room, covered as it was in pink and in rabbits, and realize that it belonged to another girl entirely. The delicate musicbox pointed to a fairytale, where she was the princess and the story always ended with a cheerful fade, the heroes gathered around each other. This had always been true. Evil was always defeated. Everyone always came back.

Until the day when they didn’t.

Usagi started to cry, again, softly, wondering somehow if it mattered that she cried at all if there was no one around to hear her. Rei hadn’t cried, at least not in front of her, and Rei trusted her more than anyone. Rei’s face was just set into hard, scowling stone. Mina hadn’t cried, she laughed, in fact, about how there had been easier ways for them all to decline her birthday party invitation. But her eyes had been far away, the smile never quite reaching them.

She still had the photo on the shelf, rimmed in a gold leaf frame. It had been a gift from Michiru, most would say an unusually thoughtful one, but it had been Usagi’s observation that Michiru may have held herself a bit above the rest of the world, but she did observe, and her thoughtfulness was never an accident.

Captured in that moment in time, they were gathered together, nestled in front of a fountain at the villa. Michiru had been so beautiful. Haruka had been so handsome. She remembered the way Mina laughed when the photographer asked why they all wanted a picture together. Cousins? Sorority sisters? Sisters in arms, had been her answer, in the way Mina could tell the truth and still have no one know.

Arms around each other, all so happy. Even Hotaru had given her best teenage smirk.

That had been less than a year ago. She took the photo off the shelf and drew a circle with her hand around the three of them.  _Rei. Minako. And me._

She cried harder, the way she had when the rain fell that day, when Rei held her to her chest as Mina shook her head, Usagi reciting each name like a prayer, a plea for them to come back. The clouds above Tokyo were not the same hazed purple of the enemy, but the soft dark grey of a funeral suit.

The fairytale wasn’t true anymore. What did the princess do when the fairytale wasn’t true anymore?

  
  


**

Rei pulled her way to Usagi’s house, as if drawn by some unseen force. Unseen, but not mysterious. Since that day, they had been burned closer, melted together like the tin soldier and the ballerina, forged in the heat of that terrible moment. That Usagi would need her was a constant, especially now that there were only the three of them.

And Mina, it seemed, had managed to keep her base separate from the rest.

Had she always held herself off so much? It had never seemed that way, back then, but Rei was beginning to understand that Michiru had not been the only one who did not say precisely what she meant, all the time. Mina had been the author of distraction, then as now, and maybe, it seemed, Rei had fallen for it.

And there was no distracting anymore. There hadn’t been since the moment Mina ran the enemy though, when the world came crashing to a firm and decisive halt. The victory cheer had been very silent that day. Sometimes even when you win, you lose.

It flashed in her head again.

“ _Ami! Mako!” it gradually worked its way into an open sob, “Hotaru! Michiru! Haruka!” but Mina just keeps shaking her head, and the blood is still dripping off her sword. The little girl–she was a little girl again, and not a monster–lay dead in the grass beneath her feet._  A buzz goes through her head, a flash of static.  _Mako is wearing a wedding dress and clutching a set of flowers and Michiru somehow still looks elegant with a baby balanced on her hip and Usagi is crying but it’s beautiful this time, more like the tinkling of bells than that jarring stab of her sobbing._ Zap.  _Mina has blood on her sword again, but the girls are standing behind her this time, Usagi still crying, but Mako comes and joins Rei in hugging her and even Haruka puts a hand on her shoulder. Zap. Hotaru is crossing the stage and accepting her diploma and in spite of herself, she’s smiling. Zap. Mina’s head is bowed again, and she has Haruka’s ring in her palm, and Usagi is sobbing the names again, and we’re back._ Zap _. Mina is getting on a plane, and she doesn’t look out the window as it takes off._

Rei shook it off, and realized she was on her knees. Unsuitable, if you asked her.

“Miss?” There was a hand on her shoulder, and she knocked it away, glaring.

“I’m fine!” She wavered, but struggled to her feet, as the young man went on his way. She didn’t want his help. She didn’t need it.

“ _There is no one future. There are potential futures, and they change and turn like the colors of the sea.” Michiru played with the chain about her neck in an uncharacteristically absent-minded way, her voice drifting out over Rei’s mind.. “And sometimes, the ghosts of futures whose time has passed…they haunt you.” She looked out the window, away from Rei, and then looked back with a clever smile. “But of course, your Sight has such immediacy, it’s not a thing with which you shall ever have cause for concern._ ”

Maybe this had been Michiru’s parting shot. A curse for siding with Usagi.

It wasn’t like the sea for her. More like a TV, switching. Michiru wouldn’t even leave her the elegance of it.

It was happening more now, but it didn’t matter. She had to go to Usagi.

That whistle blew, even when it didn’t.

**

Rei knocked, but only lightly, and only as a rare moment of ceremony, generally lost between them, but things felt so strange now, and even what had always been was practically the subject of a surrealist painting–Rei could have looked up into the trees and seen a koi swimming through it,without the slightest bit of confusion, anymore.

But there was no koi, just Usagi, sitting cross-legged on her bed, staring down at that picture from the wedding. Rei had meant to get rid of that, but even if  was the right thing to do, it felt wrong.

“Mina hates me.” It was more painful for not being a loud sob, but a soft and weak warble against the dark.

“She doesn’t, Usagi.”

“I know why she does.” She held her knees to her chest, and Rei instinctively drew her arms around her.

“You didn’t do anything wrong.”  _Should have stopped that sentence one word earlier_ , she heard Mina quip in the back of her head, and she gritted her teeth. 

“I want them back!” Usagi looked up from her tears for a moment, and gazed out the window. “It’s all my fault. It’s all my fault they’re gone, Rei.”

Rei’s eyes burned with anger. How dare they do this. How dare they hurt Usagi like this, make her doubt herself. How dare they leave,  and leave Rei to clean up the mess, she was always cleaning up the mess, and it wasn’t FAIR, how dare they. The visions of their bodies, the red barely visible against Michiru’s purple dress, splayed out like a fallen blossom where she had dragged herself next to Haruka, whose hair was draped over her eyes, almost like she was just taking a nap on the cool grass. Mako’s fists still balled, as if any moment she might get up and fight. Hotaru’s tiny body, crumpled. Pluto’s body, already gone, already disappeared back to wherever to was she had come from and to where she would return.  A little girl, run through.

It should have filled her with sorrow, but all she felt was the rage returning.

How dare they die.

Rei’s eyes narrowed. “It wasn’t! The enemy was so strong, and they, they weren’t careful.” it sounded like an unconvincing lie, even to her, but ‘it was their job to be brought to slaughter to save you, if it came to that’ didn’t seem particularly comforting at the moment, even if it was true.

They say the truth will set you free, but a rabbit in a cage is more likely to see old age.

And Michiru said she never listened.

Usagi sniffled and shook against Rei’s shoulder. “I didn’t want want anyone to go!”

“I know, I know” Rei stroked her hair. “No one did, it’s just–”

“It’s just that the world didn’t ask us,” Mina leaned against the doorframe for a moment, the leather jacket she wore hanging off her frame uneasily, “I, for one, am going to leave a scathing Yelp review.”

The cheerful sarcastic nihilism still sat on Mina’s shoulders like that hand-me-down leather jacket, strange and unfamiliar.

Mina’s edges had grown sharp against the hone of so much loss, and Rei scarcely trusted her alone around Usagi anymore. The bright blue of her eyes seemed flinty and greyed somehow, though Rei knew that shouldn’t be true, couldn’t be true, things didn’t just change like that, but then again, every knew a Seer’s power belonged to them alone, and never transferred and yet here Rei was, possible futures spread across the table of her mind.

Usagi stumbled toward her in a hug, that Mina returned half-heartedly, slipping one arm around her, as Rei frowned deeply.

_Mina she tried, she tried so hard to bring them back, but they were too far gone, how could she  had known there was ever a too far, how can you be like this? Everyone takes Usagi for being so stupid but she knows Mina, she knows you blame her._

Mina’s eyes angled over at Rei as if she could see what she was thinking, and her eyebrow marked itself in a quick check. “So, what’s up?”

There never used to be anything up, for the five of them–no, the three of them–to be together. There never needed to be an aim, before, just the promise of a few snacks and some company.

But the world was different now, and a TV went off in Rei’s head, and the koi fish swam through the trees.

Usagi brought out a board game–Rei usually would have called it a stupid game for babies, but she wanted that connection between them again. She never thought she would miss it, it seemed so natural when they had all gathered around the small table, then, no need for the ice breaker of a game.

Mina shrugged, and sat down. “I have to go in a little bit.”

“Why?” Usagi tried not to let her voice break, but Rei felt the sorrow behind it, the way Mina popped in and out of their lives now, like light dappling through the trees.

The moving forward was the hard part. Usagi would be fine, Rei knew that in her heart, even as she worried. Usagi was a light in ways that she did not yet understand, and maybe never would–a raft to cling to, unsinkable. It was the one sure thing Rei had, in this new and different world, where the fire brought no illumination, but only cast the shadows longer and deeper and harsher.

In some ways, Rei worried much more about herself. The images kept coming, sometimes now whenever she closed her eyes. She saw Mina leaving, but she would never do that, not to Usagi. Not to her. She saw it reshuffled a thousand different times, different girls living and dying.

And Mina. This strange and brave new world had her detaching from everything, from Rei and Usagi. It shouldn’t be that way. She had grown strange and cold, a statue to what their lives might have been.

“I have something to do.” Mina said it sternly, stonily even.

The dice fell on double ones, and no one’s eyes held surprise.

**

Knowing the truth when everyone else has agreed upon a lie is one of the strangest parts of human existence. Made worse for the fact that they could tell no one–a secret carried around in the pit of their hearts like a snake, lurking in a dark den.

The Minamiazabu Massacre, the papers had called it, having no other explanation for how 6 girls had been found, brutalized and murdered, in the clearing of a park when kids used to play soccer every Sunday afternoon.

The police had called it a rogue gang killing, which made no sense but was probably the only option in the dropdown that seemed plausible.Thousands of theories had been floated, each more exciting than the last, about why these girls had been killed, among the people. A secret government operation gone wrong. No, no, it was a gang killing, but a rival girl gang. No, you don’t know anything, a social rival of the Kaiohs had their daughter killed, the other girls were just witnesses. Oh, I heard the Kaiohs had her killed themselves. I heard they offered a reward for information, but that was just to cover themselves. They always hated their daughter’s wife, it was an embarrassment. Well, that’s not what I heard.

“I thought I’d find you here.” She spoke to the small blonde figure standing at the edge of an overlook. People milled about below, still interested in what had happened here, and what it meant, looking for small clues, a weekend distraction for the bored chattering masses, and she wasn’t sure if she were angry or just sad, but it always became anger anyhow.

Mina looked off into the distance, that same statue she had become, over the field that had ran red with their blood, but did not answer Rei.

She fumbled in the moment, having none of Mina’s old parry on play off of. “I think I’m going to take Usagi to the shore this weekend. She’s been so–”

“Does it really not bother you?” Mina looked back at Rei, angry and confused, the slightest tinge of disgust beginning to color the corners of her mouth. “All of them, Rei. Ami. Mako.”

Rei shook her head. “Mina, there’s no–”

Her eyes narrowed as she continued, a champagne cork about to pop.  “Pluto. Hotaru.”

“What’s your–” Rei hunkered down, ready for the fight.

She inched closer to Rei’s face as she continued, her voice almost like the low growl of a cat. “Michiru. Haruka. EVERY. SINGLE. LAST. ONE OF THEM.”

Rei closed her eyes tightly, but the images came again, faster, like a television set switching between stations, of all the possibilities that had laid out before six lives, the hopes and joys and fears and accomplishments and failures, all dead in the ground now, the grass growing over their graves, and in the back she could hear Usagi crying, ‘She’s just a little girl! Don’t hurt her. Please try.’

Rei yelled over the cresting noise in her head, determined to be the greatest firework of them all. “IT DOESN’T MATTER!!”

Mina stopped, recoiling as if she’d been bit.. “Are you…serious? How can it not matter?” Her voice was soft, and her eyes, Rei saw, were brimming with tears for the first time.

Rei’s voice softened in return, both of them melting under the sorrow and the pain of reality. “Usagi has to live with this her whole life”

“God, I’m so sick of hearing about what  _Usagi_  has to live with.” Mina shook her head, and she was suddenly back, acid-tongued and furious. “I was the one who lead them. Like she asked. I got to watch them all fall at my command, and then I got to end up killing her anyway, and she  _wasn’t_  a little girl, not when she killed everyone, she only was when I ran her through. But no, Rei, Usagi’s the one we should all feel sorry for.” She kicked at the ground. “It doesn’t matter. Fuck, Rei. Although,” Mina looked back up, arching an eyebrow, “I tried to tell her, and you told me to fall in line, so…I guess if I were you, I’d pretend it didn’t matter too. That they were gone so who cares?”

Rei’s mouth forged into a hand black line against the fire, and she wasn’t sure if it flared because Mina was cruel and thoughtless and lashing out in her hurt, or, if she was angry because it was true.

“ _Usagi, we have to–” “NO, please don’t kill her! We can help!” Mina’s eyes pleading, “Usagi we can’t stop her…” A sob breaking from Usagi. “Usagi’s right! We can help!” “No, she’s literally, not, Mars.” Rei’s voices boomed over the top of Usagi’s cries. “Do it, Venus!_

“It wasn’t Usagi’s fault.” Rei needed to believe it, but, more than that, she needed Usagi to believe it, and she never would, not while Mina was angry and cold, the bitterness of a winter in her blue eyes. ”She was too strong for us.” She wanted to scream, scream against the icy wind, scream that spring would come again and Usagi would bloom and from the grey dirt the girls would bloom again. Like before.

Mina shook her head with an air of resignation. “Fine. Protect her with a lie, but you’re lying to yourself.” She chuckled darkly. “Apparently I’m the only one who remembers what really went down that day.”

Rei lashed again. “You’re so angry!”

Mina cocked her head back to the sky. “Ha! Oh god, is that the pot calling the kettle a piece of shit.” She turned her back to Rei. “Give my regrets to  _the queen_.” She said it haughtily, the way she used to make fun of Michiru, but it was Rei now, Rei had been forced into Michiru’s visions,  into her truth, but being forced into her spot of Mina’s mockery was one moment too far.

Rei ran forward with a strength and a speed new to her, and tackled Mina to the ground. The struggle was on, the two of them fighting, but not even each other. They fought the future that had descended upon them, they fought against the death and the loss and the blame and the hurt. Rei fought for Usagi, for hope, a hope she never even knew she wanted but now clung to as if it were her only lifeline in the dark. She fought for the images in her head, for the haunted house she had become.

She fought for love.

They broke apart, noses bloodied, a bruise forming on Mina’s cheek.

She licked at the corner of her mouth. “Feel better, fireball?”

“No.” The ember popped out of her mouth, alight with the truth.

Mina laughed. “Glad to hear it.” She dusted at the lapel of her jacket, and picked at the patch reading ‘H. Tenoh’ for a moment. “I’m leaving.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know yet.” Her eyes had an age to them that Rei thought would never reach them–Mina had always seemed eternally eight, and now she was eighty and world-weary.

Life, it seemed, had skipped her.

“Mina–”

She shrugged and smirked back at Rei. “Just being dramatic, I think. Haruka’s death curse, I guess.”

It paused her. Rei did not know how to tell her she had felt the same, about Michiru and the visions, about it all. Would the other girls come to them, somehow, too? Had they already and Rei hadn’t noticed? Michiru did have a way of setting the tone of a room, when she had been alive.

Or maybe it was just that, to now, no one had said the words out loud. Gone, passed, lost–all these words had been tossed, but no one had quite simply said, ‘dead’ as Mina did, flatly and without artifice.

Things had gone so wrong, and Rei was beginning to realize the casualties had not ended on that day, in the grass.

Mina began to walk away, but turned back toward Rei. “I guess I gotta figure out what I mean,” she winked, “don’t worry about it, fireball. It’ll all go the way it goes.”

Rei hated fatalism. She raged against it. You could always change things, you could always force a hand, you could always make it work, you just had to try. She wanted to scream that Mina was giving up, that she was dishonoring every single thing those girls had died for, that she needed Mina to come back, that Usagi needed Mina to come back, that there was still hope, she saw it in Usagi’s eyes. But fire could not touch stone, could not make it melt or sing or crackle, and so Mina simply kept walking, as the wind blew hard against Rei’s face.

**

Usagi was unreasonably quiet that day, sitting by the pond with her.

Maybe she took up Hotaru, when we all split the scraps of them, she thought, trying to make light, but the joke fell, even in her own mind.

Usagi looked at her with those eyes, innocent and true. “Rei, what’s going to happen?” She was asking the universe more than Rei, she knew, but at the moment the universe rested rather silent.

Rei looked back at Usagi, somehow still with hope in her eyes after all of this. She thought about the images that came to her, in night and in waking sometimes, now, too. She thought about Mina, and what she had meant when she said she had to go. She thought about Usagi, and what all of this meant, and a feeling of helplessness came over her.

  
Rei nodded defiantly against the wind, beating it back. “I don’t know, Usagi. But I’ll be there.”


End file.
